Robert Eugene Ward (September 13, 1917 – April 3, 2013) was an American composer who is best remembered for his opera The Crucible (1961) after the 1953 play of the same name by Arthur Miller.

After that, Ward attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where his composition teachers were Bernard Rogers, Howard Hanson and Edward Royce.

Ward received a fellowship and attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York from 1939 to 1942, where he studied composition with Frederick Jacobi, orchestration with Bernard Wagenaar, and conducting with Albert Stoessel and Edgar Schenkman.

Around that time, Ward also wrote a number of reviews and other articles for the magazine Modern Music and served on the faculty of Queens College.

After being discharged from military service at the end of the war, Ward returned to Juilliard, earning postgraduate certificate in 1946 and immediately joining the faculty, teaching there until 1956.

This symphony was quite popular for a few years, in part thanks to Eugene Ormandy playing it with the Philadelphia Orchestra several times and even taking it on tour to Carnegie Hall in New York and Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Andrew Stiller, in his article on Ward for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, describes Ward's musical style as deriving "largely from Hindemith, but also shows the considerable influence of Gershwin".

He left Juilliard in 1956 to become Executive Vice-President of Galaxy Music Corporation and Managing Editor of High Gate Press in New York, positions he maintained until 1967.

During those years he also wrote the cantata, Sweet Freedom's Song, in 1965; the Fifth Symphony in 1976; a Piano Concerto in 1968, which was commissioned by the Powder River Foundation for the soloist Marjorie Mitchell; a Saxophone Concerto in 1984; and the operas The Lady from Colorado in 1964, Claudia Leqare in 1977, Abelard and Heloise in 1981, Minutes till Midnight in 1982, and Roman Fever in 1993 (based on the short story of the same name by Edith Wharton).

[4][5] In the fall of 1987, he retired from Duke University as Professor Emeritus, and continued to live and compose in Durham, North Carolina.